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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Who are the all-round top students?

by Marilyn Achiron

Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Summer in the northern hemisphere is barely over and we’re
already talking about doing well in school? Not only are we talking about doing
well in school, we’re talking about doing very
well in school – and in all of the three subjects that PISA assesses: reading,
mathematics and science.

As this month’s PISA in Focus explains,
all-rounders – students who attain proficiency Level 5 or 6 in all three assessment
subjects – are rare: only 4.1% of 15-year-old students meet this high standard. Why do – or should – countries
care about the number of all-rounders they produce? Knowing the proportion of
students who excel in these three subjects helps countries to determine the
depth of their future talent pool, which has significant implications for a
country’s ability to compete and grow in an increasingly information-based global economy.

On average across OECD countries, 16.3% of students are top
performers in at least one of the subject areas of science, mathematics or
reading. But just because a student is a top performer in one subject does not
necessarily mean that the student excels in all subjects. In Switzerland, for
example, nearly one in four students is a top performer in mathematics, but
only about one in 12 is a top performer in reading and one in ten is a top
performer in science. The same is true for many Southeast Asian countries and
economies, notably Hong Kong-China, Korea, Macao-China, Shanghai-China,
Singapore and Chinese Taipei, where the likelihood of finding students who
score at Level 5 or 6 in mathematics is considerably greater than that of
finding students who score at that level in reading or science.

All-rounders are found in many countries and economies, but
the proportion of these students varies considerably across school systems. For
example, Shanghai-China has the largest share of all-rounders – 14.6% of
15-year-old students – followed by Singapore (12.3%); but fewer than 1% of
students in Chile, Mexico, Turkey and 21 other countries and economies meet the
criteria for being “all-rounders”. Yet all-rounders are found nearly equally
among boys (3.8%) as among girls (4.4%).

What is somewhat surprising is that, among countries with
similar mean scores in PISA, there are notable differences in the percentage of
academic all-rounders. For example, Korea and Singapore score about the same in
mathematics, reading and science; but while 12% of students in Singapore are
all-rounders, only 7% of students in Korea are. This means that even the
best-performing school systems are not equally capable of producing top
performers in all subjects.